Tuning into MediaTuner

The ink on the Feed Demon, Newsgator deal is not even dry and I am already onto the next big thing – MediaTuner, a new RSS reader, which combines RSS feeds with torrents, live video streams, podcasts and live audio streams and tons of other most commonly consumer elements of digital lifestyle. Photos, served up fresh and nice. Why, you can even play flash based games as well. (Marc will be so proud, for he has been saying this forever…. and I mean forever!)

If you were looking for an easy to use digital lifestyle/media aggregator that works inside of pretty much any browser (as long as there is Flash), then MediaTuner is not going to disappoint you. (Mind you my experience on a Firefox on a Mac was sub-optimal, though Safari performed admirably.) A sparse, clean interface, reminiscent of OddPost email client uses most common protocols like Quicktime to playback video and audio. (You will see a cute icon that says Play Media and that will playback, say movie clips off video blogs.) I think, the feature set of this new broadband application sets a high bar for other feed-readers which would now have to adapt and offer multimedia abilities. I mean if podcasting is going to be huge, lets make it even more easier to consume.

MediaTuner is he brainchild of David Cronshaw, who in his past life had created Zap2It. I emailed and asked him, what prompted him to develop this application. “It was the realization that Rich Media was was taking off, but (there was) no “TV Guide” to organize it,” he emailed back. Being a former TV guy, I don’t blame him for thinking about the ‘idiot box’ all the time.

“When I saw the possibilities of RSS over a year ago, I immediately saw the ability to organize Rich Media into one easy-to-use web-based RIA application,” he says. RIA, by the way means rich internet application. He roped in Flash guru Fernando Florez and together the duo developed to be the swiss army knife of digital content. “We have created the ability for a Universal MediaTuner Player to be able to view over 80 file formats such as Quicktime, Windows Media, Real, PDF’s, JPGs, Flash Games, and streaming audio and video to name a few,” says Cronshaw. So what’s next? Allow users to automatically download Podcasts to iPods as well as videos to Personal Video Players (PVPs) and create the next generation of Podcast and Video Blog stars (Rocketboom.) Okay now I should stop… but seriously folks, this one is worth trying. What do you have to lose anyway?